There have been two movies about the harm caused by the northern california electrical utility, PG&E. There is the Erin Brokovich in 2000 with Julia Roberts. There is Ron Howard’s documentary, Rebuilding Paradise.
The Victims or their heirs got some money. However, the bad guys won.
PG&E lost the lawsuits but they just increase the utility bills so that customers lose.
The Lawyers won.
In the movie Erin Brokovich, the character inspired by Walker in the film, Donna Jensen, played by Marg Helgenberger, was awarded $5 million. But Walker said she received far less.
“I didn’t even receive a fraction of that,” Walker explained. It made it look like we won and we really didn’t. … The money did not fix the problem for me. Not at all.”
Walker and her family were tested for chromium 6, a process she said was “excruciating.” “After we received our results back, we all had chromium 6 in our DNA — that was pretty devastating,” said Walker. “The process of getting checked was excruciating. They had to scrape our gums, and of course, because we were known to have nosebleeds, anyway, my daughter’s gums wouldn’t stop bleeding for days.”
The Hinkley case was settled in 1996 for US$333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in United States history. In 2006, PG&E agreed to pay $295 million to settle cases involving another 1,100 people statewide for hexavalent chromium-related claims.
85% of the people have left Hinkley.
PG&E caused the 2018 Campfire because for the faulty power line. They filed for bankruptcy, citing expected wildfire liabilities of $30 billion. On December 6, 2019, the utility made a settlement offer of $13.5 billion for the wildfire victims; the offer covered several devastating fires caused by the utility, including the Camp Fire. On June 16, 2020, the utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.
The PG&E still has a near monopoly and the California government is allowing PG&E to continue to operate. Customers are forced to pay increasing bills to pay for the lawsuits and incompetence.
Probably Over 2000 PGE Caused Wildfires and Counting
Dennis Wyatt, the Bulletin, also covers the issue of PG&E.
A few months ago PG&E itself predicted the settlement they engineered after killing 84 people and virtually wiping the Town of Paradise off the map that they will earn a record profit of $2.4 billion by 2024. This will be done with annual rate increases of 8 percent through 2024 that will pay for equipment upgrades they systematically and recklessly diverted to pump up profits for years. Of the billions more ratepayers will pay for “safety” work that was already supposed to have been done with previous rate increases, the state is guaranteeing PG&E a profit of 10.5 percent.
Who is protecting 16 million Californians from the No. 1 cause of wildfires in state history?
PG&E has been directly blamed for its equipment causing 1,500 plus wildfires in the six-year period from 2013 to 2016.
Regulatory agencies such as the California Public Utilities Commission and ultimately elected politicians in Sacramento that have authority over PG&E and all utilities.
California state law essentially prevents corporations that engage in criminal acts or are not financially solvent to operate public utilities. However, this has not changed for decades.
PG&E was responsible for either by admission or based on the conclusion of CAL FIRE investigators were 102 of the 165 deaths and 19,514 of the 40,142 structures that burned from 2013 and 2019. PG&E was responsible for the Dixie fire in 2021.
Pacific Gas & Electric will face trial for manslaughter over its role in a 2020 wildfire in Northern California that killed four people. The Zogg Fire that began in September 2020 tore through the forested county south of the Oregon border. The blaze burned 88 square miles of land and destroyed more than 200 homes before it was brought under control.
Four people died, including an 8-year-old girl and her mother who were caught by the flames while trying to drive away from their home.
State fire officials said the fire began when a pine tree fell into a PG&E distribution line.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) concluded in January 2022 that a tree falling on PG&E’s electrical distribution lines caused the 2021 Dixie Fire. The fire started on July 13, 2021 and burned over 963,000 acres in multiple counties. It became the second-largest wildfire in California’s history.
Jan 25, 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a settlement agreement between the CPUC’s Safety and Enforcement Division (SED) and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), which penalizes PG&E $45 million for its involvement in the 2021 Dixie Fire.
PG&E was sued for starting California’s largest wildfire in the 2022 Season. The Mosquito fire burned almost 77,000 acres in Sierra hills.
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None of this makes any sense.
Utilities, in rich countries, are subject to rigorous and constantly updated standards for all equipment and regular inspections at pre-determined time intervals. A disinterested third-party will typically do a comparative sample or a comprehensive review. Then there is a Report. Often. Occasionally publicly available.
Is new equipment to such standard? Is existing equipment inspected and assessed for function, repair, or decommissioning? Is the outstanding work so overwhelming that there is insufficient resources and so: things go wrong in the ‘meantime’? Are the repairs faulty? Are the facilities insecure and subject to tampering or encroaching Nature? Have residents of high-risk areas been warned and then chose to roll the dice? Is a vicious culture of union indifference/collusion combined with lame management simply smothered general incompetence?
I suspect that it is a –mediocre Region unable to overcome impractical politics– to direct and fund effective repairs for a –bloated and unmanageable utility-entity– set into a political environment of anarchist residents and stifling regulation to effect work. Just a huge L-wing clusterf*k, frankly. Best just to go to Texas or maybe NM.
The problem isn’t with too many lawyers; it’s with not enough lawyers doing the even more important jobs like criminal prosecution. Without the civil litigation, we wouldn’t know half of what we do about the crimes committed at these companies. That must be followed up with jail time.
If you think paying lawyers for this hard and risky work is wrong, you haven’t seen the cost of unrestrained white collar crime. Over thirty years ago, my father prosecuted Champion Insurance for the $180 million in automotive insurance premiums they embezzled into foreign bank accounts. Their phony bankruptcy-for-profit scheme decimated the lives of poor motorists who lost their damaged cars in repair shops that stopped taking the nonpaying insurance – and then, unable to drive, many policyholders lost their jobs.
My father’s partner in unraveling this fraud – WBRZ (and later CNN) reporter John Bliss Camp – just died. Read his obituary page if you want to know more. The last day I saw him in the hospital, the local paper ran a story about how $600 million *a year* is now being transferred into affiliates in Louisiana, depleting property insurer reserves and causing bankruptcy. Compensating “investors,” we call it now. Only now people aren’t losing their cars; they’re losing their houses after storm damage when their insurance won’t pay.
Without civil litigation left in their courts, we wouldn’t know even this much about it – but don’t worry, Republicans are coming for this last avenue of justice too in their latest bout of “tort reform.”
There’s a word for countries that effectively strip their citizens of their private property rights: Communist.
The rabble below hasn’t imposed it on us; the rabble above has.
The rich in this country spent fifty years trying to overturn the right of privacy solidified in Roe v. Wade, culminating in the Dobbs decision that purports to abolish the right of privacy in America.
How do you have private property rights without the more fundamental right of privacy? Why are we supposed to care about Chinese companies spying on our kids through Tik-Tok apps if those children aren’t supposed to have privacy rights in the first place?
The Fifth Amendment protects private property from arbitrary government search and seizure. The First and Fifth Amendments protect the privacy of our thoughts. These rights don’t simply disappear because judges decide to throw them out.
If the government can force women to produce children for free without compensation for their labor like the old Soviet Union consigned convicts to work in gulags, couldn’t we consider that the same arbitrary use of government power? Don’t these women deserve to be paid for this work, whether or not you think using the power of the government is justified here? What about the medical costs they are forced to bear – more than $10K per birth in some places? What if they die? Where are the death benefits for the families left behind?
At least when governments draft soldiers to risk their lives for others, the men get a paycheck, paid medical care when wounded in battle and death benefits for the families they leave behind.
The Supreme Court doesn’t believe women deserve any of that when the government forces them to do this work.
That’s called slavery.
The attitudes swirling around the white collar criminal looting of Boeing and other companies in the last few decades reeks of that kind of high-handed entitlement once reserved to Communist and Nazi elites, famous for the looting of the territories they occupied.
Getting us to hate the plaintiff’s bar has been part of a long looting project by white collar criminals to close off our access to any justice at all. Think what you want to of Erin Brockovich, but without her doggedness, the truth about PG&E would never have been told. The true outrage here is how few of these murderers go to prison. The death toll from frauds like tobacco and oxycotin easily number in the millions, far outstripping petty street crime, terrorism and even many wars.
I wanted to add one more remark.
You’ve been consistently right about one central problem I’ve worried about for years: depopulation.
Steve Jobs was fond of quoting Wayne Gretzky about success: “Don’t skate to where the puck is; skate to where it’s going.”
Economic growth is a function of population. With a shrinking population, all of our problems become much harder to address.
The cost of this white collar crime wave can be measured in falling birth rates and shrinking life expectancy. Families need budgets to even get married much less bear and raise decent children. Housing prices/rents are rising due to factors ranging from appraisal fraud, ludicrous zoning restrictions, a broker cartel (only now being sued to death) and hedge fund purchases that pursue asset value over personal use value for the properties, many of which can sit empty to raise rental prices. College debt has risen for no good reason, as have medical bills. Only now with so many people trying gliptin drugs like Ozempic can you start explaining to them how foods have been processed to be highly addictive – and, in the process, create chronic diseases like obesity, cancer and diabetes (and the gliptins just do what butyrate, yoghurt and omega-3’s do more cheaply).
There’s plenty of great science, but our political regression has obstructed our ability to distribute and use these wonderful technological advances because we failed to heed the most fundamental lesson the Founding Father’s bequeathed to us: people are corruptible; don’t trust anyone with too much unchecked, unsupervised power/money.
Good doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers are invaluable but we must face facts that the professional class is increasingly corrupted by bad corporate incentives and no long serves the community who investment funded their education. I believe this is the ultimate cause of our population crisis.
You lost me at child birth is slavery.
Nature isn’t a slave driver.
many of the problems you are complaining about are compounded by the population decline you facilitate.
I like how commentor Wade ties in presumption that the more libertarian party (Ronald Regan claimed to be libertarian) is the problem, as if we couldn’t guess how he votes based on his prose. Not sure what state he lives in, but mine has codified/solidified infanticide in the law of the [state] land, as was the intent when the supreme court threw out RvW sending the issue back to the states.
You want to be libertarian? Let’s discuss your most fundamental piece of property – you. Rape victims haven’t consented to being pregnant. The government forcing them to risk their bodies – their most fundamental piece of property – doing work to make another person against their will (and for a criminal, no less) is not consensual labor. It’s not compensated labor either. Which is slavery. Do you own yourself or not? Do you own the product of your own labor or not?
The segregationists in the South liked to play these games. Whose liberty mattered and whose didn’t. Who got to vote and who didn’t.
We’re either equal or we’re not.
Furthermore, fetuses aren’t legally citizens under the constitution – that requires being born or naturalized, so if they’re people, then that makes them aliens, under the originalist intent of the constitution. You’re making citizens do work on behalf of alien non-citizens for free. I thought you people were against all that.
But, but innocent lives, you say. Yes, well, then you should pay the mothers-to-be for that work at the very least. The complications of pregnancy – especially for young teenagers can be expensive and deadly.
Costs are always passed along to the consumers. This shouldn’t be surprising.
I will say, I think that California environmental regulations concerning clearing (or rather not clearing) built up dry biomass, had much to do with the Paradise fire along with PG&E.
Are we back to the ‘let’s rake the forest idea’? The federal government owns approximately 50% of all land in California. The next largest owner are private landowners, followed by the state at a single digit percentage. There’s no California environmental regulations in this discussion.
These utilities, including the one I work for, are basically part of the state. The companies may be traded on the stock market and maintain the illusion that they are competitive entities, but they exhibit all of the characteristics of state-run ‘enterprise’. They are propped up by subsidies and their ‘market’ is subject to a lot of manipulation/tampering. Anger towards PG&E is misplaced and should be directed at the state. Contrary to conservative belief, the majority of the population is happy with the state, and how most infrastructure is being handled.